Look at You, You’re the Fake News Now

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The meme war continues to twist and turn mere days into 2017, and Trump continues to ravage the Left at trans-dimensional backgammon. I know, I know; ascribing Trump’s broadsides to 4-D chess is overused and generally a big-if-true kind of deduction, but hear me out.

The mainstream media came up with the “fake news” moniker to describe the horribly bad clickbait outlets that were posting sensationalized lies on real-ish sounding URLs during the 2016 election. For example, if you read that Hillary Clinton had been arrested from a site with a URL like abcnewsnow(.)com, and then proceeded to share it on Facebook and Twitter, you got pranked. A lot of low-information conservatives, especially boomers, had a propensity for consuming fake news, and discrediting those blatantly false sources thus also served to discredit the politics of the people who were reading them.

Because perception matters more than reality, the ideology of those baited was ridiculed as something as stupid as its lowest-information followers. The meme became that Trump voters were a bunch of village idiots being fed a steady diet of fake news from Russian shills, or something like that. But liberals expanded fake news to include just about anything conservatives believed about Clinton, terrorism, illegal immigration, etc. In doing so they created their own fake news mindset, where truth mattered far less than weaponized perceptions.

But those people lost; Trump won. And now he’s beginning to turn the screws on them. At his first press conference this year, he rejected the questioning of a mewling CNN reporter, labeling the outlet as “fake news.” The linguistic kill-shot has returned. Just as the patriots melted down statues of the king to make ammunition, Trump has taken the Left’s memes away from them.

Archetypal numale journalist Christopher Hayes tweeted his reaction succinctly: “Congratulations everyone who ironically used fake news. You won. Lol nothing matters. Epistemic nihilism 4eva.”

Indeed. Fake news is not originally Trump’s phrase, but he is going to own it now. We’re not in “post-truth” politics, we’ve just finally arrived at the logical conclusion of all this postmodernist deconstructionist bullshit. That is to say, anything is true and false.

Fake news is now something the Right can use to attack with. When CNN and Buzzfeed promoted (un)intelligence agency leaks that claimed Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on him in Moscow, they went off the deep end. Watersportsgate is not going to stop the inauguration; it’s fake news. Only diehard anti-Trump election deniers really buy into it. More incredibly, this fake news plays into the scatological obsessions of the very same people who shriek at the terms “lying press” and “America First.” Obviously, whoever came up with this was a Weimar deviant:

However, there were other aspects to TRUMP’s engagement with the Russian authorities. One which had borne fruit for them was to exploit personal obsessions and sexual perversion in order to obtain suitable kompromat [compromising material] on him. According to Source D, where s/he had been present, (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and OBAMA [whom he hated] had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and deriling [sic, probably scan-to-text error] the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms.

How long before Trump gets labeled anti-Semitic (again) for using fake news as a synonym for luegenpresse? Because that is how he is meme-ing this. Trump, it seems, did not care in the slightest about the original usage; he took a familiar buzzword and re-purposed it. Fake news now means media outlets that put out anti-Trump hit pieces while claiming to be unbiased. Functionally, he is being as vicious to the press as he was before, but now he is using their own slander against them. And it is use that assigns meaning in our deconstructed world and not form, not any innate or inherent essence. Try as they might to argue that Trump is #NotMyPresident, they cannot strip his office of its power over perception. If the President of the United States says something—right or wrong, earnestly or in bad faith, true or false—the world listens.

This is quantum jenga. Trump is taking their meme and leaving them with Pissgate. This is going to seriously discredit them (or it should). Trump should instruct his administration to refuse access to these kinds of outlets. CNN literally confirmed for Buzzfeed tier. Look at how fake you are. I’ll bet you won’t even engage in self-criticism.

The fake news meme will become the property of the Right, bigly. Liberals are not going to use Trumpisms, words and expressions fouled by the stain of fascist Nazi white supremacist patriarchy. When they protest that you are Literally Hitler™ for using the term “fake news,” give them a friendly wave and remind them just who started this. We’ll be exchanging that pawn for a queen, thank you very much.

The above was reprinted from Atlantic Centurion.